


No Gallant Soldier, I

by Her_Madjesty



Series: Twelve Days of Christmas - 2020 [3]
Category: Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War I, F/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27925996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty
Summary: The world turns over in the year after Messina. As the following summer dulls the memories of all involved in that conflict, the days stretch like taffy and Italy finds its way merrily into war.
Relationships: Hero/Don John (Much Ado About Nothing)
Series: Twelve Days of Christmas - 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2037376
Comments: 10
Kudos: 16





	No Gallant Soldier, I

**Author's Note:**

> On the third day of Christmas, a harried writer gave to thee...a WWI!AU?
> 
> I had to do a bit of research and finagling for this piece; thus, the later-than-preferred posting hour. Even so, I hope you enjoy what's here and don't mind its oddities. Trigger warnings for vague violence. See you on the 8th!

1915.

The world turns over in the year after Messina. As the following summer dulls the memories of all involved in that conflict, the days stretch like taffy and the nation finds its way merrily into war.

Don John, more at home in his half-brother’s cells than he is in the estate at Aragon, cares not for the goings on of Germany, Austria-Hungry, and whatever conflict is to be found between them. But he wakes to the sight of his half-brother’s face, one morning, and is informed that caring is now part of his duty.

For the Italian forces declared their intent to bring Austria-Hungry beneath their heel, and now he and the men like him must follow.

In some quiet part of his mind, Don John finds himself if not relieved then at least not irritated that this latest disaster in his life is not of his own making. He is less at ease when his half-brother fits him with a _sottotenente_ ’s uniform and bids him to use his knowledge of warfare to the benefit of those who might love him. Don Pedro leads a contingent of his own as _tenente colonnello_ , of course, but Don John finds himself separate from that cluster of loyal dogs.

The few countrymen who come to his unfamiliar contingent with him, helmed by one Dino Alfieri, know little of him, and he finds little point in acquainting himself with them.

It is early May when he leaves the estates at Aragon. Under Alfieri, his contingent marches towards France just as the weather starts to turn, the cold finally breaking. Still, the further north they travel, the more it is that frozen mud cracks beneath his boots instead of any proper soil.

Though his cuffs grow dark and his boots worn, the weight of his gun does not so much as bend his back.

Given his position, Don John is not aware so much of the goings of the regiment. Instead, in the exhaustion he faces from day to day, he goes where he is bid. The morning’s stand-up more often than not involves long, loping paces along the boundaries of the camp that his superiors command that they make. The deeper into the French Alps they get, the more the younger men around him clamor to see action, civilization – anything.

But Don John has done this work before.

His siege on Aragon, unsuccessful as it was, familiarized him with a few truths. War, in practice, is an exercise in boredom. The days blur together, with snow and bitter wind obscuring any memories of a peaceful, hot summer. The rations grow tasteless, both for the quality of the food and for their lack of variation. This time around, Don John is not among those superiors making decisions for the men, so there is not even a cup of mid-afternoon coffee or the promise of strategic thinking to keep his mind from dulling around the edges.

In other circumstances, there may have been the men, but his desire for company has long waned. Before late-night stand, in those few hours of peace that he has, he watches little groups come into being. Some men have brought books with them from the comfort of their homes, while others sit, crouched, over a deck of cards. More than a few dive into discussions of the Bible, with Protestants and Catholics alike peppering the night with arguments that would be bitter, save for the exhaustion painting them all.

Of the few personal effects his half-brother allowed him, it is Don John’s sketchbook that keeps him the best company. Though he will not join these men in their late-day revels, he crafts work of all of them. Here is young Pietro with his newly-blackened eye; here are Giano and Jorge with their poorly-hidden cards; here is Alfieri with his misericorde, prepared, in his own way, to do the service to his contingent that the enemy might not.

Later on, when even those faces begin to blur with their familiarity, there are those he saw in the summer. From memory he crafts a passing likeness of Leonato’s villa back in Messina. His pencil sketches those same rolling hills next to small pictures of birds or tracks or a soldier’s boots.

(He sketches none of those faces he’d come to know so well in the summer, though Borachio’s nose appears and is erased from more than a few soldier’s faces. The closest he gets, beyond that, is a portrait of an open window, its curtains billowing out into the courtyard as the stars twinkle overhead. When he realizes what he’s done, Don John snaps his sketchbook shut and goes to find something – anything – to occupy his mind.)

*

Their first combat comes as a surprise – to their superiors, at least. Don John wakes one morning to a different smell in the air and waits, waits, waits for those men of rank to say something.

He cannot say “I told you so” when the Austrians arrive on the horizon, but it sits on his tongue the entire way through their action.

He is, at least, good at what he does. Morning bleeds into afternoon as he loads, fires, and reloads his gun. The natural, orderly lines that his superiors so admire devolve rapidly in the face of extended combat. Those men, who would normally content themselves to rest in a tent some miles off from the battle, instead thrust their bayonets into the thick of the fighting with the rest of the wet-eared boys trying not to piss themselves with fear.

Don John sets himself up between a few mountainous trees and picks off what parties he can. By the time the fighting comes to an end, there is a bruise in the crook of his shoulder, and his right eye is twitching. His hands are sore.

Below, in that still field, Colonnello Alfieri is the only man on his feet. Don John watches as he unsheathes his misericorde. He does not relish in the deaths of those men he traveled with, but he watches with a tired eye as those last ragged breaths are silenced in the dying evening.

*

(And Don John has done this before, where it clear from the shaking of Colonnello Alfieri’s hands and the few screams from the dying men in the field that he has not. So he does not approach the upper brass with the intention to endear himself to those parties there; it is not in his nature to do so. Instead, he enters Colonnello Alfieri’s tent at the bidding of an exhausted man and accepts a tin cup of coffee as, around camp, the fires of the living men dull.

He presents his offer to the colonel in between those precious sips. Alfieri raises an eyebrow, but there is blood under his nails still, even though the skin of his hands are pink for all of the scrubbing John imagines he’s done.

The colonel unbuckles the misericorde from his belt and passes it over without complaint. “Better you than me,” he admits, staring into the depths of his cup.

Don John does not have to imagine that sense of self-hatred, stewing deep in the other man’s belly. Instead, he stands and salutes, affixing the sword to his belt and leaving the tent without so much as a backwards glance.

There will be no more screams on the battlefield after the fighting is over. He will see to that.)

*

If the men made passing gestures to get to know him before, they actively avoid him now.

Don John does not carry the misericorde with him at all times, but it rapidly becomes common knowledge that he has it in his possession. Those few men who traveled with him from Messina are quick to endear themselves to their peers, telling everyone who will listen the stories of Don John’s failed campaign against his half-brother, not to mention those “brave punishments” he faces now, separate from those parties that might, given their familiarity, find themselves obligated to protect him.

In other words:

“His brother sent him hear to die,” spits one man as Don John passes him in their traveling mess. “And now he’s going to kill us all.”

He does not rise to the bait, though he does not hide his disdain. His lip curls without a thought, and the speaking man rises only to be held back by his peers.

Don John takes his meal on his cot and thumbs through his sketchbook, the misericorde catching the noonday light at his side.

*

They encounter his half-brother at an inconvenient moment, in as much as it can be called so.

The noise of battle punctuates a dull morning in late July. Don John wakes with the rest of the men at early stand-up and joins the half-organized, several-mile jog to the battle that his contingent has been called to in a bid for reinforcements.

By the time they arrive, the course of the battle is clear to any willing to look.

Where once there may have been a marvelous charge across the rocky terrain, there is now destruction. Italy’s young men lay besieged by Austrian forces, with horses and bodies alike scattered among the rocks.

In the distance, Don John’s commanding officer shouts for the men to advance – and they do, even the weakest kneed of them, their guns held tight in the hands. He is not on the front lines, not like he was in the earliest days, but that does not mean that he is not among the first to fire, nor among those men who must brace as the Austrians turn their attention to the newcomers.

(In the distance, there is his half-brother’s white horse, heaving desperate breaths on its side. He does not see Don Pedro nor any of his affiliates and, in those moments that allow him coherent thought, cannot tell whether or not he is grateful.)

The battle is:

Fire.

Miss.

Reload.

Fire.

Hit.

Reload.

An Austrian contingent rushes their lines. Don John drives his bayonet into the chest of a soldier without looking into his eyes and wonders, idly, if he should feel remorse. The Austrian falls to the side, as does the man at his side.

Don John abandons his gun.

By the time the fighting comes to an end, what was meant to be a concentrated loss on the part of the Italian forces instead appears to be a draw. The Austrians retreat, licking their wounds but with their campfires clearly visible in the distance. Don John picks up an abandoned rifle from one of his fallen colleagues to better replace his own.

He looks across the field. Colonel Alfieri is nowhere to be seen, but one of his superiors is. When he spies Don John, he waves his hand – and Don John turns back to the field.

The broken battlefield is not silent, but his footsteps are ever-loud, even among the groans of the dying. He does what he can for those who he comes across. He keeps the blows of his misericorde swift and pointed.

(He does this even for the men who begrudged him his duty, though the knowing look in their eyes as he dispatches them is…

Well.)

It is near the end of his duty that he comes across a familiar face. The sun is lowering in the sky, and his superiors have started fires in the mountainous pass they have carved out for themselves. No doubt they’ll convene with his half-brother’s men soon – meaning that while his duty may be gruesome, Don John is better suited for the field.

That is why he does not startle when he sees Claudio’s face staring back at him, half-covered with blood and mud. The man is barely breathing, but breathing he is, half a bayonet stuck out of his rib cage.

Don John reaches for that distant dispassion even as Claudio hacks out what, where he hale and whole, might constitute a laugh.

“Of course it’s you,” the youth rasps, smiling into the mud. “Dear God, will you leave me here to suffer and finally have your revenge?”

Don John does not make a point of speaking to his victims, but he finds his voice wrenched from him, all the same. “I would be lying if I said I was not tempted.”

With what strength he stills has, Claudio spits. “Then go. I have no desire for my last thoughts to be framed by your face.”

Don John takes in this fallen soldier, this shell of a man. Then, he crouches.

“I hold by what I did,” he says, his breath puffing against Claudio’s face in the cold. “And I will not apologize for what I am. But go in peace, Count Claudio, knowing that my actions here bear no tinge of our quarrel.”

His cut is true. Claudio breathes his last before he can reply, fury written into his features before they drop into nothingness.

Don John wipes his sword clean on a patch of moss nearby. He feels, distantly, as though he should pray, but he is not in the practice of doing so on the field. Instead, he looks down at the corpse of the man who stood in his stead at his half-brother’s side and feels –

Nothing. A tinge of grief, but then the dull thrum of a day’s work setting deep into his bones. Not even a hint of vindication.

It would almost disappoint him if he wasn’t so tired.

With a quick glance back towards the tents of his superiors, he flips the young man over and rifles through his things.

In many ways, the count proves predictable. He bears a pocket Bible, chewing tobacco, and a reasonable supply of ammunition. There is no ring, Don John notes, on his wedded finger nor any in his many pockets – a surprise, considering that the last he saw the man, it was meant to be at a renewed wedding.

There is, however, a sketched portrait – a bad rendering, but a rendering nonetheless, of the woman once meant to be Claudio’s bride. Don John stares down at what he assumes to be the Lady Hero, her portrait tucked into the count’s under-used Bible.

It’s a poor work. Don John’s interactions with the lady may have been fleeting, but he looked upon those eyes and found them...polite, before he wronged her, more so than those of the men and women who followed his half-brother. Here, the lady’s gaze is distant, and her miles of curls are hidden beneath a bonnet.

He does not know what drives him, but Don John tucks the sketch into his own breast pocket. From there, he gather’s the count’s ammo and more personal effects to carry back with him to his cot.

He leaves the body behind him. What penance he owes the man is currently playing out. To even deliver his effects to those who might miss him is more kindness than most believe him capable of – and more than the count deserves. But Don John, for the villain he is, is a soldier. And for all of the disdain he bears his kinsman and his peers, letting the man’s memory to rot in this field of dead seems...unseemly.

He leaves all but the portrait of Hero with his superior officers, then makes his way to the mess. Those men on watch give him a wide berth, though the expressions of few – when he raises his head to look – are more pitying than they are damning.

Uncertain of what to do and sick to his stomach, Don John discreetly vomits before lying on his cot, only to stare at the sky instead of sleep.

*

The days drag on.

He does not speak with his half-brother after the meeting of their contingents, but he does see him. He has a new horse – a gift from Don John’s superiors – that carries him away from the field of the dead just as morning takes the mountainside. Benedick rides at his side. Even at a distance, Don John can make out the distress on his face and the golden glint of his wedding ring.

(He considers going after them, the sketch of Hero heavy in his pocket, but he doesn’t.)

His superiors aim to continue their trek further into France, even with the Austrians bearing down on them from the east. Over the next several days, Don John and the soldiers of his contingent alternate their time between skirmishes with guerilla groups and grueling marches in the damp and brittle nature of the Alps’ summer.

He doesn’t know when he starts, but in between the blood and the mud and the chafing of his boots, Don John thinks a little longer on Hero.

His quarrel was not with her, he reasons, in the midst of reloading his rifle. She served a useful tool at the time, and he bore no thought for the pains she might have suffered. News of her death brought that same bile he’d suffered upon Count Claudio’s death into the back of his throat, though he’d held himself steady as he’d made his escape from Sicily and the reach of his half-brother.

Seeing her alive – standing at an altar, with Claudio and Don Pedro unchanged for their cruelty to both her and to him –

He’d left that coming together before its conclusion, two guards watching his every step. But the relief beating hard in his breast fell quiet, overwhelmed by the low, boiling rage at another, seemingly inevitable, loss at his half-brother’s hand.

Now, though –

A shot whistles past his head. Don John stabs forward with his bayonet and lives another moment, enough time to reload his gun and take another shot at his superiors’ enemies.

It is foolish – naïve, even – to imagine her touch at his chest; that sketch, so improperly done, deflecting a blow on his behalf. But Don John lives from one breath to the next and finds himself touching the pocket, as though he is a religious man.

*

It becomes...a habit, to treat her image as a rosary.

He’s not proud of it.

In many ways, he thinks to himself, as one battle blends into another, it feels blasphemous. He misused the lady, after all; to think of her now reaching out a hand to protect him is more than just foolish. It is the mad belief of a man fighting himself to death.

And still. He takes care to protect the sketch from the worst of the blood and mud he sees on a regular basis. He does not take it out to study it, but he finds himself back at his sketchbook, rendering versions of the same woman with a more practiced hand than Count Claudio’s.

(His memory may be old and fading with the coming of fall, but there was never any denying the air Hero carried about her. The only time the glow around her dimmed was when his shadow crossed her path. Even then, his was a passing visage – it was the count who darkened her doorstep for the longest, who drove that bright spark away to hide beneath a bushel.

Don John cannot say whether or not it returned, but in the sketch that Count Claudio unwillingly bore unto him, it seems as though it has not. In it, Hero’s eyes are downcast, and her person shrunk until the two dimensions of the page seem to suit her more than life itself.)

In some distant reach for forgiveness, he tries to find a medium that might suit her better.

The sketches serve, for a time, but pencils are sensitive to the wind and the weather. He covers a few errant pages with her figure before bartering with another soldier for a pen. Here, her lines find themselves made anew, but he fiddles with the shading on some of his works for so long that her expression ends up obscured.

When they next pass through a town – small, barely worthy of considering civilization – he barters a pen sketch in exchange for charcoal. Whenever the nights grow late but the light remains, courtesy of nearby campfires, he tries again. The insubstantial nature of the medium makes his work more tentative than it would normally be, but it feels...better, somehow. As though it is more respectful.

Around him, the war carries on. But he entertains himself, these days, with quiet thoughts of the woman he wronged and the dull, guilty twang in his chest when he calls on her aid.

*

He is nowhere near the trenches when the first of the shells hit.

It is the middle of the night. Don John is awake and bleary-eyed, though he’s loathed to admit it even to himself. The world is still gray around the edges, but it’s coming into itself. The French have dug themselves in, and the Italians are expected to join them by daybreak.

Little do they know, but they have led both the Austrians and the Germans to their doorsteps.

Shells, be it day or night, whistle as they fall. Don John’s sleep-drenched brain jolts into awareness as that same birdsong sings out in the darkness. He hesitates – too long, too long, for the shrieking is getting closer, aiming for them instead of the French.

By the time he thinks to dive behind cover, it is almost too late. The ground shakes with the shell’s impact.

It is the first of many.

Somewhere between the first and the fifth, Don John feels a hand grasp for his wrist. He stumbles forward – and a fist collides with his face (an accident, one of his comrades will later swear). As he tries to keep himself from falling backwards, the ground beside him rocks. He’s thrown down, the breath forced from his lungs.

A hand goes to the sketch still kept close to his heart. Don John closes his eyes against the ringing in his ears and the shaking of the world.

He is not a man for apologies, but in these teeth-rattling moments, with mud in his mouth, Don John murmurs the most earnest prayer he’s managed in all of his twenty-seven years.

Hero’s name is the last thing on his lips as the world goes gray, then black.

*

The next week passes in a haze.

He does not remember being taken from the battlefield. Were he conscious, he could not name a man with the heart enough to offer him that kind of peace. Whoever it is, though, does not touch the misericorde at his side, but rather sets him in one of the many hospital carts and sees him off again.

He dreams in that cart. Dreams of hot summers and white curtains, of blood on the ground and wine on his lips.

He dreams of Hero – forever just out of reach, forever turning away until he forces her attention to him, a chaste-not-chaste kiss pressed against her knuckles.

The guilt that strikes him is rivaled only by the nausea of near-consciousness. The only way to escape it is to find refuge in that cool darkness of sleep.

*

When he wakes and finds himself coherent for more than a few moments, it is to a white ceiling and to a face that is far, far too familiar.

His body feels – separate, as though it is not his own. He tries to rise out of the cot he’s resting on, but a firm, gentle hand presses him back down. A cool cloth drags against his forehead, and he almost gasps for the cold of it.

Don John cannot draw words into his throat – can barely manage one breath after another – but there is Hero, frowning down at him with a directness that he never merited before.

He makes a sound – he must, for she shushes him in a moment. As his vision clears, he can take in the starched collar of her uniform, the cap tucked into her mountain of curls, the damp cloth in her hands that she presses against his brow.

“You’re safe now,” she tells him. Her voice does not shake. With what little energy he can muster, Don John wishes to reach out, to touch that tender hand, to tell himself that this is real and not some sick joke of a dying man’s mind –

But then sleep claims him for its own, and Hero disappears again.

*

He never gets a chance to ask her whether or not his waking world is a dream. He can never summon the voice to do so.

But every time he wakes, it is Hero watching over him. Her hands brush the hair back from his eyes or check the march of his pulse at his wrist. She explains to him, when he is able to listen, that one of his legs is long gone, but that he’s otherwise well and safe. His commanding officers bid him to return to his half-brother’s estate in Aragon, where he will be delivered at the end of the month. Hero does not say whether or not this deliverance is for bed rest or house arrest, but then again, he does not need her to.

She looks at him with more kindness than he could ever deserve, and he loathes himself – her – the both of them for it. As such, he does not speak to her, only watches her when he is able, feigning a lost voice in addition to his lost leg.

It is in that extended silence – in many ways, no different than his time with Italy’s fighting forces – that he learns more news.

Benedick and his half-brother survive, much to Hero’s delight. She tells him as much when she brings him his lunch, which he eats busies himself with in an attempt not to stifle her happiness. News reached her long ago of Claudio’s death – she asks if he had seen him, before remembering his supposed ailment, then looks away as though she is sorry.

(He will never tell her that Claudio died at his hands, he finds himself thinking. There is no ring on her left finger nor around her neck, but there is a sadness around her eyes when she speaks of the count that suggests...well. Nostalgia has a way of making fond memories even of the villains in our history. If she can offer such refuge to the memory of Claudio, Don John is not going to compromise what forgiveness has been offered – without his consent – to him.)

There are smaller pieces, of news, as well. The nurses get into a tiff, one day, and Hero retreats to his cot to busy herself and steel her expression. The Italian forces cannot keep up with the advancing of now both Austria and Germany, she murmurs under her breath, and she has been chided for hoping that they may still come out of this war an unfractured country.

When he manages to find some paper, one day, he writes down a question for her – how, he wonders, did she come to nursing and escape her father’s gaze?

Hero’s response is honest instead of rueful, and Don John feels all the worse for it.

“What use to a father is a daughter who will not marry?” she asks, her voice soft as ever. “He thought I would do better to find a husband for myself among the soldiers coming home, and I could not stand by without helping those who needed me.”

Despite himself, Don John reaches out a hand and presses it against her knuckles. Hero starts – nearly flinches away – but his grip is a tight one. It is a dirty mirror of the kiss that he would press to her knuckles would she lets him, but it is the most he can offer her. An apology without words, his guilt and his pride twin weights on his tongue.

Hero lets him cling to her hand until his strength gives out. She sits by him a little while longer, humming as he dozes.

“Yours is the first familiar face I’ve seen in months,” she tells him, somewhere in the world between waking and dreaming. “For all the wrong you’ve done me, I still find that a comfort. Is that not the strangest thing?”

*

He sees her less often in the days that follow. A new wave of soldiers come down from the mountains, and she and her fellow nurses must attend to those in the most need.

His self-imposed silence carries on, even as he’s fitted with a crutch. The doctor who comes past him tells him that he will depart in a few days time, to be taken back by his half-brother’s carriage to that villa in Aragon. He passes along a note from Don Pedro, still splattered in mud.

Don John reads it in what few hours of daylight he has. The urge to spit on it never quite leaves him, but he takes...comfort in the message at hand.

His only debt now is to the Lady Hero. His half-brother sees the loss of his leg as penance enough for last summer’s insubordination. He is granted his life and a position within the villa at Aragon. While Don Pedro is away, the staff with answer to Don John, and he is to provide the prince’s allies with the means and services they would require.

“I am damned with a generous foe,” he would bring himself to say, were his tongue not stopped and anyone around to listen. But even Hero has abandoned him, brought to other duties that add to her burden and darken her fair brow.

The day he goes to leave, he still has not seen her. He is offered back his affects – his sketchbook, his misericorde, his gear – and helped into a carriage by two faceless nurses. He nods in thanks, jaw clenched tight, and tries not to think of the jaunt of a horse that he may well never experience again.

He leaves only a folded piece of paper behind – a letter, one might call it if one was feeling kind. It is addressed to the Lady Hero, and he bids through rough sign that the nurses see it delivered to her. Within it is the only apology he can manage; the one he still cannot bring himself to utter.

(There is an invitation, as well, written into the convoluted text. Don John does not let himself think on it but knows that, should she suss out his meaning, she might make herself at home in the princes’ villa before the war comes to an end. It is the least, he imagines, that he can do in light of her terrifying capacity for forgiveness.)

The cart driver smacks his reins against the oxen in their yokes. Don John does not wave to the nurses, but looks past them, instead.

He clings to the sight of those white-washed tents, that lowly field hospital high in the mountains, until a bend in the road takes them out of sight.

*

The war will drag on for another three years, taking thousands of young men with it. In that time, Don John will familiarize himself first with a crutch, then with a cane, and make much of his half-brother’s estate. He will dream of shells bearing down on his head and wake with a scream on his lips – but there will be no one there to comfort him.

Not until the news comes.

Italy will find her peace in some great eventuality, and the boys will return to their homes. Don John will wait for his half-brother with the man’s loyal staff, but the man himself will not come.

(News, though, will arrive declaring that Lord Benedick has returned to his own estate, and that both his wife and his men rejoice for his return.)

Halfway in between these talks of peace and Don John’s own sinking realization that this land is his by right and birth, now, a guest will arrive at his gates.

He will be trodding the front walk when she does, leaning heavily on his cane while he speaks with his foreman about the new births in their cattle herd. He will not be the first to see her. But he will turn when he is bid and see that white linen moving with the breeze, those curls shoved back from her face and cut shorter than he has ever seen them.

Hero will walk to him and curtsy, his old letter still in her hands. And in tones quiet but confident, she will ask him if his invitation still holds.

Don John will gape and struggle to find his tongue. When he does, he will guide her to his rooms, and the two of them will talk until the sun moves to kiss the western horizon.

(And it will be a start – a beginning, as fragile as the new trust between them. But it will be something more than John the Bastard would ever dare to ask for.)

**Author's Note:**

> Comments? Spare comments? Let me know what you thought; your support keeps my spirits high!


End file.
